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In 2009, a project was implemented in 8 primary health clinics throughout Tanzania to explore the feasibility of integrating pediatric HIV prevention services with routine infant immunization visits.

Methods

We conducted interviews with 64 conveniently sampled mothers of infants who had received integrated HIV and immunization services and 16 providers who delivered the integrated services to qualitatively identify benefits and challenges of the intervention midway through project implementation.

Findings

Mothers’ perceived benefits of the integrated services included time savings, opportunity to learn their child's HIV status and receive HIV treatment, if necessary. Providers’ perceived benefits included reaching mothers who usually would not come for only HIV testing. Mothers and providers reported similar challenges, including mothers’ fear of HIV testing, poor spousal support, perceived mandatory HIV testing, poor patient flow affecting confidentiality of service delivery, heavier provider workloads, and community stigma against HIV-infected persons; the latter a more frequent theme in rural compared with urban locations.

Interpretation

Future scale-up should ensure privacy of these integrated services received at clinics and community outreach to address stigma and perceived mandatory testing. Increasing human resources for health to address higher workloads and longer waiting times for proper patient flow is necessary in the long term.

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Harvard School of Public Health. Maternal Health Task Force.; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S.); National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (U.S.). Division of Reproductive Health.; United States. Agency for International Development.;

Published:

January 2014

Series:

Women and Health Initiative working paper ; no. 1

Description:

In June 2013, a group of international maternal health and HIV researchers came together in Boston under the auspices of the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) at the Harvard School of Public Health, the United States Agency for International Developm...